“The ability called proprioception [From Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own” and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement] tends to be poor in children,” explained Martz, “Which means they struggle with asymmetrical gestures and frequently confuse their left and right.

“We realized we had to do was add very forgiving gestures,” said Martz. This way Once Upon a Monster doesn’t worry if the child raises her left or right hand. Determining which false negatives kids are more likely to offer and developing around it, even against common Kinect development rules, was necessary. The natural relationship with the movement of the body had to be a bit forgiving, because kids move a LOT. Sometimes kids don’t always move the way they think they want to move.

Additionally, Once Upon a Monster was designed to be as Martz explained, “Friendly to the rhythm of family life.” This means something even more dynamic than your traditional drop in/drop out multiplayer. It meant that as long as the Kinect could see someone, you keep playing.

When it came to the tried and true backbone of Sesame Street, educating kids in an entertaining way, there were additional challenges. Figuring out how to teach age appropriate lessons such as ABCs or 123’s didn’t really fit with the game. Instead, Double Fine took a “whole child education” approach that tackles larger, stickier emotional issues. Empathy, sympathy; Dreams, hopes; Wants, needs – these are the elements of the puzzles the Monsters ask kids to help solve.

“Joy is worth it,” Martz concluded. “If we want to reach a broader audience, let’s make our games about feeling more than ‘fight or flight’. We have a finite number of ideas we can express in the time that we have, and it’s incumbent on us as developers to make those ideas count.”

Every year at the time in San Francisco many of the gaming industries brightest and best gather for the Game Developers Conference. You can be sure we’ll be there talking with various space geniuses about Kinect, too!

In fact, if you’re headed there be sure to take note of two sessions of particular interest to anyone developing for Kinect”

“Kinect’s human-tracking algorithms represented significant advances in computer vision when launched just over a year ago. And luckily, the team didn’t stop there. Learn about the new features and quality improvements added since launch, as well as best practices for incorporating this new functionality into your Kinect title.”

“Many successful and innovative games use gestures as input. These games range over a wide variety of genres, platforms and input technologies, from a touch screen of a smart phone device to a full natural motion controller input device such as Kinect. Developing high quality reliant gestures is a non-trivial time consuming engineering task. In this talk we present an innovative new technology for developing high quality reliant gesture detection using machine learning. Demos, results, implementation and optimization details is discussed. Two case studies are also presented where solutions to gestures from Kinect Sports and Kinect Sports: Season Two are discussed.”